arcgis-desktopcartographydisplaydraw orderlayers
I know that in ArcGIS drawing order is controlled by layers, and if I want to make some features be drawn on top of other features I can use definition queries to separate them into different layers and position one on top of the other.
But I was wondering (mostly out of curiosity) what dictates the drawing order of the 1000 overlapping polygons in my feature class, and if there's a way that I can control what features are displayed on top within one layer?
Since you know how to iterate and find the features that you want to merge, I would build a function to do the merge which could probably be arcpy.Dissovle_management(). Do the dissolve and you can probably use the aggregating parameters to combine the attributes then delete those features from the original and update the data back with a insert cursor.
How do you identify which features need to get merged?
In the Symbol Property Editor, try putting a white sold line underneath your dashed line of the same thickness. This seems to clean up miss-matched overlapping line representations, see caption below:
Best Answer
Normally, the features will be drawn in the order that they are returned from the database/file. This order is arbitrary and can change.
The only way that I know of to control the drawing order within a layer is to use symbol levels. With symbol levels, you can dictate the drawing order of individual symbol groups within a layer. You'll have to symbolize your layer either by categories or graduated symbols, but you could use the same style for everything if you want to.
More information on symbol levels: Working with symbol levels